Mr Black has alerted me to a rather nice Java word game
at Yahoo;
Word Racer is much the same
as Wordzap,
which is essentially just Boggle, but - as befits a game run by computer - rather
than a word being discounted if both players get it, the person who
spots it first gets the points. Word Racer uses some
rather odd board shapes, but seems a splendid little diversion for the
wordily minded.

16.12.00

Hm, I've just been playing a demo of Empire's Typing of the Dead - half 3D zombie-shotgunning fest,
half, er, typing tutor. Your character dashes around the game
automatically - all you have to do is type the words that pop up
in front of the undead, as quickly as you can. Get it right and
down they go.

Empire may have tapped into something big, here - actually having
an excuse to flourish your fingers and go "Ahaha!" after some
particularly speedy typing is a glorious experience. Or is it just
me that gets an odd satisfaction from rapidly typing a lengthy
login password? [Vote:
Yes or
No]

15.12.00

The position of uncertain.org has
been undetermined for the past day or so, hence no particular updates and a
thoroughly missing site. Oh well.

It's always strange - simultaneously invasive and reassuring - to be reminded that
countless other people have listened to what you think of as the
soundtrack of your life, that it's just as likely the soundtrack to
their own. Weirdly, unpleasantly defiling to hear a booming neanderthal
request for the beautiful, painful, B-sided "Silently Screaming" during
every single quiet moment of last night's gig, though.

The tobacco industry campaigns against putting
horrible
pictures on fag packets to get across just
how much damage the things can do to the human body. Better than the
tiny warnings at present, I admit, although it seems terribly naïve to think that
most smokers don't realise cigarettes can kill them.

Besides, as a non-smoker I don't really want to have to look at photos
of cancerous lungs every time a friend lights up. Wouldn't it be better to
have insulting and sarcastic messages in huge white-on-black text? "THESE
KILL ME AND I PAY FOR THEM.", "STILL TOO WEAK TO GIVE UP.", "DO I LOOK
COOL AND INTERESTING YET?"
and whatnot. I'd applaud that.

"I was crouching in the haze of a copper-bottomed swamp, but heaven knows I'm all-weather now..."
Odd how randomly-generated
sentences often seem more amusing than intentionally-written stuff.

I've always been impressed by the range of personality disorders in the
work of A.A. Milne; a group of neurodevelopmentalists have gone as far
as writing a jokey paper on it - Pathology in the Hundred-Acre Wood.
The "medication solves everything" message is almost entirely self-defeating in
this context (friendship and complementing character traits being much of
what life's about), and the single-parent assumption is rather offensive,
but it's an amusing enough commentary.
[via MetaFilter]

12.12.00

Hm, I got a transparently malicious
screensaver
virus thing in my mail this morning, yet
it was delivered from an anonymous address rather than purporting to come from a friend
of mine. Is this a cunning propagation tactic, made on the basis that
most people's friends wouldn't send them nudge-nudge Snow White stories?
And does this mean that my "only have friends intelligent enough to leave
dodgy executables alone" worm avoidance scheme is flawed somewhere?

Take the Guardian's amusingly pointless
yob
test if you've any doubts about your yobness.

A foolishly small audience for last night's Neil
Innes gig; carelessly underadvertised, by the looks of it. A splendid
evening, though, regardless of the fact it was the same general thing he did a few
months ago - heaps of anecdotal rambling of the Bonzos, the Rutles
and Python, and various songs from here and there (including the splendid
Protest
Song). Pity so little of his stuff is commercially available. Copyright
all owned by bastards, I think he's said at one point.

The Logo Foundation offers copious
resources for the old turtle-directing programming language, including
freeware downloads.
I didn't get where I am today
without programming a plastic turtle to wander
around the floor of a primary school.

It annoys me when my subconscious writes better stuff than
my waking brain. I had a genuinely disturbing nightmare last night; Day of the Triffids
without the Triffids, just the sudden blinding of ninety-nine per cent
of the population, and the resultant anarchy. Dreamt in an unnervingly
narrative style, with a lot of horrendous "Only later did I
realise..." asides.

Lampless suburbs roamed by fully-sighted prison escapees and the reckless,
starving blind, myself flailing around on a lightweight motorbike (silently pushable
when creeping around, but speedy enough to escape sighted attackers)
being shot at a lot, and
blind children being bundled into what claimed to be NSPCC
vans ("only later did I realise..."). Very vivid and unpleasant desperation and
violence. I woke up in total horror around 3am and still haven't quite gotten
the nausea out of my head.

Proudly displaying a mysterious understanding of free speech and the
Internet,
eWatch
helps companies find negative customer comments online,
and "removes offending messages from where they appear in cyberspace". It
also promises to track down specific posters "within 7 to 10 days for a
price of up to $4,995 per screen name". What drivel. Let's see how long it
takes them to delete this message.
[via Raak@MCiOS]